His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a
destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being
killed.
'My God, my God,' she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her
life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing
her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.
'Shall I die, shall I die?' she repeated to herself.
And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained
intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the
holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but
followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual
'thou shalt,' 'thou shalt not.' Sometimes it was he who seemed
strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a
spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this
eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified
because the other was nulled.
'In the end,' she said to herself, 'I shall go away from him.' 'I can be free of her,' he said to himself in his paroxysms of
suffering.
And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave
her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.
'Where shall I go?' he asked himself.
'Can't you be self-sufficient?' he replied to himself, putting himself
upon his pride.
'Self-sufficient!' he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round
and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of
his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be
closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised
it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to
win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one
convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to
close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious,
self-completed, a thing isolated.
This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much
he might mentally WILL to be immune and self-complete, the desire for
this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that,
to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she
wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her.